DC unveils art from “Batwoman #0”

Oh, Batwoman! Winged vigilante of the night! Into the abyss of contrived, titillating and nonexistent lesbian characters you descended, with your impossible red hair and your seductive red lips and your authentic, organic story — and lo, you won the hearts of fanboys and fangirls everywhere! Then Greg Rucka left you for dead, and we thought you were gone forever. We gnashed our teeth and rent our garments in twain! And then like a balm to our self-inflicted misery, DC announced that JH Williams was drawing and writing you into your very own solo title. And, oh, how we celebrated!

The time for Batwoman #0 is almost upon us, and DC has finally rolled out the first look at the artwork for the story that will bridge the gap between Batwoman: Elegy and Batwoman #1, due out in February of next year.

CBR: In your artwork for Batwoman in Detective Comics, I see a lot of your work trying to solve problems and bringing more elements to the story instead of just depicting people — you use style, color, mood, composition and even page layout to get some larger points across. But with you simultaneously drawing one arc and writing for another artist, how do your tendencies to get so much across with your art conflict with you “just” being the writer for Batwoman?

Essentially it’s one of the things where you try to get as much descriptive detail in the document that you’re working on; it’s not just “here’s what happens and here’s where it happens.” But it’s important to imbue the feelings the scenes should evoke, and what the storytellers’ point is for the scene and larger story. In some ways, I’m trying to put down on paper visual descriptive stimulation along the lines of something you’d want to read besides just a bare-bones outline of a story and “here’s some dialogue to go with it.”

I can’t help but think in those terms, and it goes into my writing as well. I want to write scripts that are fully fleshed out and have some sort of readability to them. A lot of times we’re dealing with the esoteric emotion side of things, and it’s important to think about how scenes could play out with a particular layout and what that could symbolize. I’m trying to interject a lot of things but not be too heavy-handed and allow Amy Reeder to draw the way she draws – not the way I draw. It’s important for me to make her feel comfortable doing her own style. But at the same time, I’m working to find a way for it to be cohesive with what came before. It’s a tricky balance, and I’m anxious to see how it all shakes out.